The Delta Pastorate

“Enlarge the place of thy tent, and let them stretch forth the curtains of thy habitations; spare not: lengthen thy cords, and strengthen thy stakes.”

— Isaiah 54:2, ASV

The Delta Answers

The Christians of the Niger Delta did not accept what had happened at Onitsha quietly. Their archdeacon, by the Nigerian accounts, had been suspended. Their bishop had been humiliated. Many of them had suffered persecution for their faith, and had built and paid for their own churches. They did not see why a committee of young Englishmen should now decide who was fit to be their pastor.

Their answer was not to leave the Church. It was to stop taking the society’s money. The congregations of Bonny and the neighbouring towns, led by Archdeacon Dandeson Crowther, declared that they would support their own churches and clergy themselves. With some help from sympathisers in Lagos, they raised the funds, and, as Stock recorded some years later, “they have never again looked to the Society for pecuniary help.”

They asked their bishop to make it official. After consulting the members of the churches, they put a formal application into his hands, asking that the Delta be made a self-supporting native pastorate, like the pastorates that already existed in Sierra Leone and Lagos. Crowther sent it on to London with his full approval. Some modern historians say he had drafted the scheme himself in the spring of 1891. His letter supporting it spoke of the opportunities opening in the Delta, and of its unhealthiness for Europeans, and concluded that the suggestion “is providential that the Delta district should be made a native pastorate to be worked entirely through native agency, towards the expenses of which they resolved to contribute.”

It was, in fact, exactly what Henry Venn had hoped for thirty years before. Page himself quoted Venn’s hope “that in course of time the churches in the Niger Mission shall become self-supporting, as those in the Colonies are.” Venn had called it the “euthanasia” of a mission: the point at which the missionaries could step aside because the church they had planted could stand on its own. The Delta churches had reached it, not in the peaceful way Venn had imagined, but in the midst of a quarrel.

Not a Secession

The society’s leaders in London were not pleased. Page, who wrote as the society’s friend, admitted “a little natural regret” that the proposal “should come at a time when some misunderstanding was felt on the Niger.” Stock wrote that “coming just then, it had more the appearance of a secession than was pleasant.”

But he was careful to add: “it was in no sense a secession from the Church of England, and only a temporary alienation from the Society.” This matters, because the Delta Pastorate is sometimes described today as the first African breakaway from the Anglican Church. It was not. The Delta Christians had no wish to leave the Church of England, its Prayer Book, its creeds, or its bishops. They asked for the Archbishop of Canterbury’s counsel, and received it. They left the control of a missionary society, not the Church.

Other African Christians in those years did leave. In Lagos the Native Baptist Church was formed in 1888, and in 1891 a group of Lagos Christians left the mission churches to form the United Native African Church. The treatment of Crowther was one of the grievances that fuelled that movement. Crowther himself never encouraged it. The Delta Pastorate was his answer to the same pain: to stay in the Church, and to take responsibility for it.

Bonny, 1892

Crowther did not live to see the pastorate inaugurated. On 29 April 1892, four months after his death, it was formally begun at Bonny, with services of thanksgiving at St. Stephen’s Church and St. Clement’s. The preachers were the Rev. J. Boyle, who had sat beside the bishop at Onitsha, and Archdeacon Dandeson Crowther.

Dandeson’s sermon has survived in part. He said that God seemed to wish “in these latter days to extend the name and knowledge of His beloved Son by simple, inexpensive means, using local instruments to carry it into the interior.” By forming the pastorate, he said, “the people make the religion their own, and are already feeling the responsibility of taking the Gospel with them everywhere they go.” The ordinary Christians of the Delta, traders and fishermen and canoe-men, were carrying the gospel up the creeks where the missionaries could not easily go. “It may be said that they are weak, yet they act as pioneers for us.”

It is the voice of his father. Samuel Crowther had always believed that Africa would be won chiefly by Africans, and that the strength of a church lay not in its buildings or its foreign support but in its members’ sense that the faith was their own.

Reconciliation

The breach with the society did not last. When Joseph Sidney Hill, chosen as the next bishop, was sent out by the Archbishop before his consecration to visit the stations and ascertain the position of the new pastorate, the Delta Christians received him warmly. It received his successor, Herbert Tugwell, in the same way. Both, according to Stock, were “loyally received by them as their ‘overseers.’” In 1896, after conferences in London and Lagos, a formal constitution was agreed, setting out the pastorate as a self-supporting branch of the Church of England, governed by its own church councils under a bishop. Page credited the settlement to Bishop Hill, Bishop Tugwell, Archdeacon Crowther, and James Johnson of Lagos, who would himself become an assistant bishop a few years later. In time the pastorate came back into closer relations with the society.

Dandeson Crowther remained Archdeacon of the Delta for decades, and lived until 1938. Stock, writing in 1899, called the Delta Pastorate “the most encouraging thing” in the Niger region, “a practically independent African Church.” By then even the society’s own historian could see it as a success.

The Planter and the Increase

The prophet’s words at the head of this chapter are addressed to a barren woman, told to prepare for more children than she can imagine. “Enlarge the place of thy tent … spare not: lengthen thy cords, and strengthen thy stakes.” A century earlier, William Carey had preached on the same text when he called English Baptists to send missionaries to the world. The churches of the Niger Delta were one of the answers. From a handful of converts at Bonny in 1864, persecuted and despised, had grown a church that paid for its own clergy, sent its own members as evangelists into the interior, and stood firm when its founders were wronged.

Crowther did not see the full harvest. Few pioneers do. Paul said of the church at Corinth: “I planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase” (1 Corinthians 3:6, ASV). Crowther had planted. Dandeson and the pastors of the Delta watered. The increase was yet to come.